Video communication is a very efficient way of knowledge sharing and information exchange in various fields including education, business and marketing. However, with existing technologies, streamable media such as audio and video are generally associated with non-trivial waiting times while the media get uploaded, processed, and stored, before being made shareable on network-connected devices. For example, uploads to the popular video-sharing website YouTube involve a long waiting time due to the transcoding of quality streams before allowing users to view and share the media. Another video-sharing website, Vimeo, has a similar process as YouTube, with waiting times taking up to 40 minutes. In the case of Vimeo and YouTube, waiting is still acceptable because media are consumed in a televised format instead of being used as a messaging mechanism.
File hosting service provider Dropbox attempts to reduce this waiting time by utilizing on-demand transcoding in real-time while streaming. Transcoding happens after an upload completes, with the operation first done on the initial few seconds of a video to give servers sufficient time to catch up and transcode the rest of the video content on-demand or as a background job. In other words, processing is deferred to make the transmission seem streamed by doing some work up-front. As a result, a user will inevitably run into buffering issues.
The aforementioned difficulties of synchronous real-time video communication and waiting times associated with asynchronous media upload provide for unsatisfactory user experiences and technical difficulties with using video as part of business communications.
It is against this background that the present invention was developed.